I spoke to Lean Startup coach Tristan Kromer at Lean Startup Week earlier this month, where he presented a workshop about a “lean experiments toolbox”. Lean Startup Week is a conference for teams and leaders interested in applying a Lean Startup methodology to their product and Tristan helped to organise the Lean Unconference that kicked off […]

What “lean” means for us in product development I very firmly include myself in the group of people converted to the “lean” product philosophy, but what does this word really mean? Well for the broader context, lean derives from post-war Japanese culture, where limited resources were the standard. Working in these conditions – a situation […]

How do you know whether a product idea is going to succeed if you build it and take it to market? If you’ve ever been part of a startup, or if your organization has launched a new products, you know how precarious the effort can be. Sure, there is Lean methodology for discovering product-market fit, […]

If you’re interested in becoming an entrepreneur or an inventor and making money from something you thought of and designed then there is one thing you need above everything else before you can begin: an idea that you can work from. If you hope to make money from a product then of course you need […]

As explained in my earlier post, in summer 2013, I built the same minimum viable product (MVP) three times on three different continents. It was an experiment with a purpose: To evaluate three platforms and three teams at the same time; and to utilize the “lean way” in using validated learning to build my new company’s […]

I built the same product three times. It wasn’t an act of insanity. It was my way to get my product ready in three weeks. Before I get to that, let me backtrack a little. It was the 1st of March 2013 and I’d just left my job as CIO at one of the UK’s […]

Challenging your assumptions can pay off. This is what UK retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) discovered when they created a digital lab and started applying Lean Startup techniques to their products. At ProductTank February, Hemal Kuntawala (@hemalkuntawala) talked us through some of the specific insights and assumptions they wanted to challenge. Each assumption is met with a […]

As the UK shops itself out of recession, it was more than fitting that February’s ProductTank London was all about product management in commerce: online, offline and mobile. This month we had three eye-opening talks: CEO at Depop Runar Reistrup (@runarreistrup) talking about mobile design for the real world; “the Malcolm Tucker of testing” Craig […]

Is your product disruptive or sustaining? There’s nothing wrong with being sustaining by the way – a disruptive company that is successful quickly becomes a sustaining company. The important thing is to understand where on this spectrum you lie because both need to think differently when it comes to everything from marketing to how to […]